One Year of Contributing to WordPress

Today is the one year date from my first substantial contribution to an open source project. I documented the process of getting my first patch accepted last year. Since then, I’m glad to say I’ve also encouraged and assisted some others in preparing patches. In honor of this day, I thought I would write a bit about why I contribute to WordPress and open source software in general.

My software has rights. Much like I have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the software I contribute to has the inalienable rights to be used, modified, and learned from in any way that the user decides. It feels good for my code, my small contributions to join with the work of 217 others for WordPress 3.0 and 180 others for WordPress 3.1. I feel a part of something bigger. When I meet friends of friends and they talk about blogging, it’s nice to hear they run a WordPress site. All in all, I’m happier today than a year ago just because I contribute more and feel like I’m a part of something big.

Since then, there have been 44 instances of “Props Jorbin” on WordPress trac. I’ve also contributed to the WordPress IRC Bots and the WordPress PluginDirectory Slurper. My WordPress contributions have made me a happier, better developer. Contributing to a project that is used on millions of sites. My goal between now and my second anniversary is to help 10 developers contribute there first patch to an open source project. If you interested, please let me know so I can help you.

I’m going to write up some basic advice on getting started soon. In mean time, the best initial advice I can give is:

Step 1) read The codex article on contributing to WordPress
2) Attend the weekly dev chats, observing at first.
3) Follow what is going on in Trac and try to reproduce bugs people are having
4) write patches that solve the issue (and hopefully don’t create new ones)